Friday, April 14, 2017

"I like incidents of that sort, when forces that are usually so sneaky
and hard to point out slither out of the grass and are as obvious as,
say, an anaconda that’s eaten a cow or an elephant turd on the carpet."

I've written a number of posts about invisibilty and its profound effects on us and on our ways of perceiving and behaving and that quote above is one of the better ways I've seen yet of describing something invisible becoming visible. (I'm presuming the anaconda didn't eat a actual cow but a cow's turd...if she meant an actual cow then it would have been a much better sentence without evoking violence being done to an Earthling.)

That essay, among others, is in a collection of writings in a book by the same title as the essay: Men Explain Things To Me. It's a very enjoyable read and yet while I was reading and enjoying the superlative writing I was bothered...and I really didn't know why but eventually it came to me that the author seems, well, white...in her writing and in her ways of conceiving society and such.

I enjoy the heck out of her feminist stances...yet...they often feel pretty white. I know that sounds weird coming from a white guy...but there it is. I could be wrong, probably am...but hey...that's my feeling right now.

(What I'm meaning by "white" here is that her perceptions of sexism and feminism seem to arise from some universalized position of "femaleness" instead of being cognizant of and addressing of the fact that sexism as it is enacted toward women of color is different in many ways than how sexism is enacted toward white women...there are overlaps...but they are seriously different too. Rebecca Solnit seems sort of oblivious to that. It's really not possible to de-couple racism and sexism, each of those practices influence/inform the other one. Pretending that they don't influence each other or being oblivious to that is generally something that white women do. It's a manifestation of white supremacy.)

By the way, the essay called Men Explain Things To Me is often credited with being the inspiration for the invention of the word "mansplaining". Pretty nifty, eh?

You might enjoy the book, give it a read. She's a very talented writer.

Let me know if you too sort of sniff the whiteness. I'm absolutely tentative about my ability to detect it, especially where it is ambiguous, but my current stance is always to opt to err in the direction of calling/thinking something white instead of not. Heck, centuries of the denial of whiteness has to be countered in some way or other, ya know?